Life In A Pool Of Shadows
by silentmusic16
Summary: I existed in a half state of life and a non-existence. AU oneshot.


**Just another fic that came out of nowhere. As usual, I was listening to music (The Smiths) and then I wrote this. Anyway, it has a somewhat odd style but I hope you enjoy it.**

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Similar to a shadow I looked when in my hoodie and dark pants. I blended into the background, an unassuming black mass of matter hanging at the edge of existence, of society, of life. And I was perfectly fine with that. It was how I had lived my life for forever and a day.

In my apartment, my disheveled apartment stacked high with old books, papers and failed attempts at novels, to my sink overrun with mugs of cold gritty coffee I went. I washed one quickly – it had a crack in it – and I made myself some bitter black ambrosia. As per usual I sat down and worked on my latest draft. This time it was a story of a tree nymph who becomes enamored with the corpse of the man who hung himself from her branches. I write for hours and hours and yet I know that by the end this one will be just one more manuscript in the piles in the corner of my small living room.

Even in my own home I am a shadow. I produce no noise, I move silently as a ghost. As the ghost hiding in my bedroom. The one who stares at me, unblinking. Unsmiling. Unhappy. Unreal. She hovers in the corner, feet barely above the floor and in a ghastly white contrasting the bleak shadows she seems to emerge from. Those dark pools, as I had always understood it, hid secrets from the world and its people. She was just one of them. I felt as though I was one of them as well. The girl would stare, night after night, at my sleeping form as though she knew I wasn't sleeping, the insomnia in my mind dripping venom that traveled throughout my body keeping me awake the way a single cord keeps alight avenues in the city.

Sometimes the ghost was with another. A faceless humanoid form of what could be a man – if a man was just an assumed shadow of an idea in some form we couldn't comprehend. Sometimes she had more than one of these. These dolls of human souls, of the resentment of a life wasted. That's how I view them.

I had tried conversing with this ghost, this living shadow, this ephemeral representation of a female whose current life was just like mine, with a bit more floating and a bit less speaking. She answered nothing. She simply stared, watched me, followed me around my room. Her physical presence was but a cold fog and an illumination that ignored her surroundings and drew more attention to those dead blue eyes and blonde hair and dainty fingers and white dress and oh, I wanted her so!

That perverse feeling of lust and love for the otherworldly creature seeped its way into every facet of my shadowy life. In my classes I'd feel that cold fog gathering around and biting my ankles with frost that only I could see and feel. On the street, pockets of phantom light would pop in and out of existence. As though I was mad I'd be distracted and venture to these points of nothing until the odd stares of those around me drove me back to my high-rise apartment, one where all but a single window was blocked out with sun bleached stacks of hard-cover books and the occasional vinyl record. She had complete control over me without ever speaking a single word, without letting a sound out of those red lips of hers. My already sleepless nights gained a strained obsession as I tried to secretly stare at the ghost who, in her place, could see all that I was doing. Why was I scared of approaching her, of showing her that I looked forward to seeing that ghostly appearance of hers during the day instead of focusing on my life at the moment? Could she judge me with those silent lips? Beat me with those intangible hands?

I spoke to my landlord about the history of the apartment I called home. In hushed tones, so as not to disturb the neighbors, he leaned in close and told the tale of a young girl who had lived there years before.

"Died right there in that room of yours," said he. "Slit her wrists, she did, dyed the floor an unforgettable red, a terrible wine red, a crimson that would never wash out. We got ridda that rug there, we did".

Was she a haunting? Was she a good presence or an evil one and did it really matter when that dead Ophelia-esque wonder was floating and hovering and waiting for me? Night after night after learning her secret I tossed and turned. I wanted to see the criss-cross pattern on her wrist and the stains the color of fresh roses. I wanted to be reminded of my own mortality. I was no stranger to suicide or feelings thereof. I wouldn't shy away in disgust. But I couldn't bring myself to ask the apparition what I wanted. I lay, curled in a ball, sleep escaping me once again from guilt and shame and insomnia and everything else under the sun.

Beckoned me to her she did and one day I followed the call. Before her I stood, knees knocking and eyes wide to be called silently by this girl. She placed a single cold kiss on my foredhead and went once again into a state of stupor, as though she didn't know her surroundings or herself or me. The frosty embrace felt like death was stamped on my head in a sweet way.

My family and friends and peers I hid away from, rejected, ignored, forgot them all. This was before I even knew of the ghost. I couldn't stand living with and for them and not with and for me and not with and for the world. They tried contacting me and helping me and I left them all. Everything I said before was a lie – I needed to live with them and for them and to do that I had to leave because I was never going to live up to them and I wanted to oh so bad and help!

"Ghost of girl passed", I pleaded, "help me so!"

And with an outstretched hand she answered my call

And with blood dripping from her wrists, falling on my carpet, staining it the crimson red of a leaf in autumn or like wine in a glass, she held her hand out to me. And with a cold that pervaded my body and froze every crevice and touched every nerve she held out her hand to me and I walked towards her.

I had a moment of clarity, the first in many many months, and I realized that my death was imminent and I smiled. From ear to ear I grinned the grin of a child without a care in the world. The grin of a truly free man, that of a man in the throws of death and who accepts it with arms wide open.

I felt my own blood begin leaving my body through holes, big holes in my arms that I didn't put there, craters in the skin that swirled in fleshy spirals inward. It mixed, combined, became the blood on the carpet and stained it an even deeper red than it had been. I joined hands with her and the world that was once mine vanished, and I became one from the world of the shadows like I was born to do so. Everything was dark for a time, but it was comforting and I could still see her light guiding me through what I could only describe as the antechamber to the afterlife.

Eventually we ended up in the throne room of a king hidden in total darkness. One large, armored, but good-intentioned hand rose up and instantly I too glowed. The world illuminated around me and still I saw only black, still I saw no king, but now she was fully formed and I could see and feel and touch and breath her in and all was well.

The madman of the shadows became one himself, and he laughed in the corner of those dark pools they called home.

And once more the landlord cleared away a blood-soaked rug. The books owned by the dead author were auctioned. And his completed manuscripts, somehow red with his blood, were burned. All except for one, oddly the only one spared and the only one in his bedroom at the time, that had to do with a ghost that brought him to his true home in the shadows in the corners of the world.

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**Reviews are greatly appreciated, as I'd like to see what you guys thought of this oneshot. I'd also like reviews for "Radioactive Sludge", as I'd like to see your thoughts as well.**


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